


Lifelines

by gendzl



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Character Study, Developing Relationship, John's love language is knitting, Knitting, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-09
Updated: 2019-12-09
Packaged: 2021-02-26 07:34:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,983
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21729892
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gendzl/pseuds/gendzl
Summary: Knitting keeps John stable when all that's left of him is war, and bottomless grief. It speaks for him when he can't find (or won't use) the right words.Or: the tiniest AU in which John is the one who knit his aran jumper, and also Sherlock's scarf, and—
Relationships: Sherlock Holmes & John Watson, Sherlock Holmes/John Watson
Comments: 20
Kudos: 114





	Lifelines

**Author's Note:**

> I know fic is pretty inherently self-indulgent, but I'm taking it to the extreme with this one. Knitting is my first love, and I am happy to shoehorn it into anything I possibly can. The idea that John might have knit his infamous aran jumper was just too good to pass up. 
> 
> A lifeline, in knitting, is when you thread spare yarn through the live stitches on your needles. This is typically done prior to attempting something difficult or new, because if you mess up, there's no time-consuming unknitting required or fear of dropping stitches—you can just tear it back to where you started. This is presumably a metaphor for something, maybe, but it's 1:30 in the morning, I'm not entirely coherent, and this is the only good non-pun knitting title I could come up with. We're just gonna roll with it, okay? Great.
> 
> All patterns mentioned are linked in the end notes, because I have very specific items in mind for everything John makes here, but I hate disrupting the flow of a story with links. Please look at them when you've finished reading! They're pretty, I promise!
> 
> (Please note that while this loosely follows the events of canon thru season 2, I follow no timeline and bow to no masters, so some plot points are ignored while others are thrown in loosey-goosey. Roll with this, too.)

John learned to knit in Afghanistan—his first tour. One of the women recovering from surgery (an emergency, near-panicked field surgery followed by the attempt at an actual repair once John got his hands on her, but she’d lived to see the inside of an operating theater and that was all that mattered) had gotten a care package from a girlfriend who knit.

It was a truly enormous box of yarn, needles of all types, and small tools John couldn’t identify (his knowledge of hand crafts extended no further than neatly mending a tear, which he attributed entirely to his work as a doctor—Lord knows his mother never taught him to sew), along with a Knitting 101 book supplemented with handwritten notes on Post-Its and spare patterns slipped inside the back cover.

It was immensely thoughtful, and after the soldier was discharged (she’d lost her leg, in the end), she left the majority of the materials behind for anyone who wanted to learn, taking only a set of washcloths she’d made during her recovery.

John found himself stroking a soft skein of yarn a week later, during another tense round of too-quiet days—a lull in the chaos. It seemed a decent distraction, and even better, it would be one that would keep his mind occupied and fingers nimble. 

He never thought he’d _love_ it.

* * *

He began, as was recommended, with a scarf. Eight inches wide, his learning process was visible to anyone who knew where to look. The start was full of uneven stitches—tension too loose, and then too tight—and there were a few knots visible, leftovers from before he learned to pick up dropped stitches. The first two feet were a complete mess, the fabric alternating stiff and floppy, wider in some places than others, veering off course at an angle he still couldn't explain. The tail end of the yarn had been twisted awkwardly up the length of it for several inches, manifest as a bumpy edge ending abruptly in a tuft of yarn frizz.

It was a shade of drab green quite unlike that which populated the rest of the desert; just enough off-tone to clash with the uniforms, somehow, and with anything it was set against. It was not only hideous, but this was the desert.

He’d made a _winter_ _scarf_ in the _desert_.

He kept it.

There was peace there, between the needles, when there wasn’t much peace to be found anywhere else. Surrounded by the fallout of violence and the failures of war, John turned to the calm and repetitive motions of string against wood (yarn over acrylic, wool on metal). He found what he liked, and he built on it.

And, slowly, across several years and three separate tours, he became _good_ at it. His finished objects turned from kitschy to quality, and he knit items against a future he longed for but wasn’t sure he’d live to find: warmth, autumn-colored refinement, the ease of home tugged down over his ears, draped across his shoulders, wrapped around his neck. He knit for himself, mostly, but he occasionally dipped his fingers into luxurious merino wool and found the desire for patterns emerging off his needles that he couldn’t quite reconcile with his own taste. He knit them through to the end, anyway.

He placed those pieces inside a plastic tote, shoved under the bed in the sparse room of an apartment he would never call ‘home’, because home wasn’t something that existed for him anymore.

His last tour was cut short by a bullet, by his own sudden inability to hold a scalpel without dropping it, to stand without trembling, and it added insult to injury when the thing that brought him the most peace became as inaccessible as surgery—even the minute motions of his shoulder, rippling up from his wrists while knitting, was out of reach, and he was left staring up at the ceiling tiles in his hospital room, waiting for something deep inside himself to brighten.

* * *

Sherlock’s powers of deduction were impressive, but like anyone else, he would occasionally stumble across something that tripped him up; something he’d never encountered before, and therefore hadn’t quantified, organized, settled into a file in his damned mind palace.

John had lived in the flat on Baker street for three days the first time he startled Sherlock.

He was in the middle of fixing tea when Sherlock grabbed his left hand (spilling hot water across the counter where it dripped onto his socked feet, the bastard) and yanked it up to his own face. “What are these?”

Sherlock adjusted his grip on John’s hand to get a closer look, and John sighed, heart pounding in his chest. The man had no sense of personal boundaries, and he imagined that (were this anyone else) he’d be bothered by it, but on Sherlock he couldn’t help but find it endearing. He tried very hard to smother the emotion—fondness, warmth—before it reached his face.

Sherlock began a verbal dissection of his observations without giving John a chance to reply, raising and discarding potential explanations for what he saw with all the speed his intelligence gave him. “Deep, laddered up and down along your fingerprints. Not much does that. No callus, which might be part of the problem, but what _causes_ it? A dull object, perhaps a—no, that’s the wrong size. You haven’t been helping a woman with her hair recently, have you?” he asked suspiciously, eyes rising from John’s finger to his face, scanning for a response before John so much as opened his mouth.

“I’m knitting socks,” he said bluntly, cutting Sherlock off at the pass before he spoke himself breathless.

Sherlock squinted at him, and then back down at the pad of his finger. He still hadn’t let go. “Explain.”

And so he did. The needles for sock knitting are small enough to make lace. They have dull points, like all knitting needles, but they’re so small that it doesn’t make much of a difference. It’s the result of being self-taught, he tells Sherlock, of improper knitting form and bad habits he couldn’t break. He presses down on the right needle as he makes a stitch, and the tip sometimes pops through the skin, right along the ridges of his fingerprint. He'd had a callus, he added, but the recovery for his shoulder meant he couldn’t knit for a long while, and it hasn’t built back up yet. Until it does, he has these: a series of small puncture wounds on his index finger.

Sherlock made a small noise of understanding, and John watched dominoes fall in patterns, one after another, toppling behind Sherlock’s eyes as he connected dots and rearranged facts and figures to make room for new data.

Sherlock released his hand and retreated into the living room, where John heard him tapping at his keyboard moments later. Research, presumably. He'd found a gap in his knowledge that needed immediate filling.

After that, he started knitting nearby, in the chair that had been designated his.

Sherlock watches him work, no sign of boredom on his face. Interest. _Baffled_ interest, sometimes, but interest nevertheless.

A few nights later, John pulled a deep blue scarf from the tote beneath his bed and draped it around the collar of Sherlock’s coat for him to find the next morning.

Neither of them mentioned it, and this suited him perfectly well.

* * *

The scarf John made that autumn was one that probably took more time and concentration than it was worth, objectively, but what is knitting if not quality indulgence? It took him several weeks to knit—long hours in the evenings, slow Saturday mornings, and the irregular moments he could snag after a case, when Sherlock had finally given in to case-induced sleep deprivation and John’s own brain hadn’t yet managed to settle down.

He sat with five sheets of printer paper secured on a clipboard at his knee, color-coded Ks and Ps revealing a pattern that Sherlock could not immediately discern. A cheap row counter lived on the end of one bamboo knitting needle for the duration of his project, the numbers slowly ticking upward as the temperature dipped ever lower towards freezing.

That this particular project happened to drive Sherlock up their bullet-riddled wall was a not-insignificant pleasure. Harmless revenge, he said, for all the times Sherlock traumatized him with entrails in the bathtub.

(For a man so indisputably _British_ , you’d think he would make a point of filing something as culturally significant as Shakespeare in the corners of his mind palace, but he purged that right alongside knowledge of the solar system.)

Sherlock tilted his head to one side and eyed the pattern curiously. “Not a skyline,” he murmured, almost to himself.

“Nope,” John replied, budging some stitches further up towards the point of the needle.

(“Poetry, then?” Sherlock hazarded one morning in early November, when the scarf was halfway to finished and John was brushing his teeth in nothing but water droplets and a towel. "Some kind of code?" He didn’t ask politely, through the closed door, no—he opened it and stared John down from his superior height. John merely glared at him in silence from behind the handle of his toothbrush until he left, a faint blush covering his cheeks.)

“It’s not anything at all, is it?” Sherlock finally asked, an expression of false confidence painted quite unconvincingly upon his face.

John didn’t even look up from his row. “Sherlock, I would not go through the effort of keeping track of all these stitches just to piss you off. It’s a fringe benefit, perhaps, but annoying you isn’t worth all this.” He dropped a needle—leaving it dangling midair, held in place only by the live stitches and dense fabric connecting it to its mate—and gestured down at the dizzying directions at his side, the once pristine paper now marked with tea stains and adjustments in his own neat hand (pencil) as well as increasingly messy guesses in Sherlock’s (ink).

When John finally told him what the pattern meant, moments after binding off the last few stitches on a Thursday evening in December, Sherlock scoffed—entirely unamused—but he also relaxed back into the couch, unfurling into the contented posture of a man whose mystery has at last been solved.

* * *

A bullet buried itself into the meat of Sherlock’s thigh on a gorgeous day in April, and John proceeded to spend the length of his recovery practically sitting on the man to keep him from bounding off and injuring himself (further, again, both at once). By the end of it, Sherlock had wound (by hand, no way was John letting him near his ball winder) all of John’s yarn stash into perfectly spherical balls and could correctly identify every knitting initialism, abbreviation, and shorthand slang.

John refrained from asking why Sherlock considered information on knitting to be worth keeping around, when he didn’t even knit himself, and couldn’t be bothered to remember people's names half the time.

(He wasn’t sure whether he would fear the truth more than he hoped for it.)

A pea green blanket appeared on the arm of the couch without fanfare during Sherlock’s convalescence, and the musty plaid monstrosity that had lived there previously was relegated to the rubbish bin.

With that, the contents of the plastic storage container beneath John’s bed dwindled to nothing, and John opened his laptop to search for more patterns that resembled the man he was (he could admit it, if only to himself) growing to love.

* * *

The gifts were given at random. John was careful about it; he never used them as a form of bribery, or refrained from giving an item to Sherlock because the man happened to tick him off the night he finished it.

He would never want Sherlock to think they were anything but what he intended them to be, and at the same time he hoped desperately that Sherlock never realized what that was.

Love. Comfort. Home.

He was happy. Really. Content with small smiles directed his way as Sherlock wrapped a scarf around his neck, and the soft feeling that would bloom in his chest when Sherlock absently tugged the blanket he'd made him up around his shoulders as he read.

He didn’t dare run the risk of ruining it by speaking any of this aloud, and he was okay with feeling like a coward about it sometimes, just so long as he never lost the sight of Sherlock digging his fingertips into a plush pair of hand knit socks.

John spent that summer tying his heart up in complicated knots and replicating them as cables on everything from sweaters to scarves to socks until it became almost second-nature to reach for his cable needle and twist strands of yarn together while twisting himself apart.

* * *

Mrs. Hudson had never learned to knit. Her mother had knit, she told him, but stopped after the second World War, when the mere sight of knitting needles tied her stomach in knots. Knitting her bit, churning out hats and fingerless gloves and endless ( _endless_ ) socks had ruined any joy of the craft that she'd once held, and not even the prospect of passing the gift on to her daughter had gotten it back.

She had, however, kept all of her pattern books, and so John spent a series of afternoons gently guiding Mrs. Hudson’s hands into place, helping her claim this long-delayed inheritance.

“My mother died twenty years ago, John,” she said, eyes on the two strands of yarn wrapped around her thumb and forefinger. “I didn’t think there was anything left she could give to me.”

That Christmas, Mrs. Hudson arrived on the landing of 221B holding a large gift bag that she upended in front of the fireplace an hour later, spiked eggnog fueling her glee. A riot of colors waterfalled down onto the rug, slippers of every size (every set joined neatly together at the heel with a bit of contrasting yarn) on offer to anyone who happened through that night.

Sherlock chose a dark grey pair and tugged them on over his socks after hastily discarding his shoes beneath a chair. He wriggled his toes in the fabric and looked ever so quietly pleased, and John had to look away before his face did that desperate thing he knew it had been doing lately.

(Mycroft gifted John a large box of trial-sized mini skeins in all colors, and he started a hideous mitered square blanket that—he promised Sherlock—would live out its life at the bottom of the basket of throw blankets they kept in the living room.)

* * *

Sherlock jumped.

Sherlock jumped and the first scarf John ever gave him—dark blue and dense and so delicately masculine—was wrapped around his neck and all John could see for days afterwards, every time he closed his eyes, was how the blood seeped into it like a sponge.

* * *

John's grief could be tracked in yards, weighed out in grams, measured in the soft, slow plod of creations he could not bear to look at. The tote beneath his bed filled once more with gifts he did not know how to give.

He wrote, a lot. Eventually. He caught up on the backlog of cases he’d never bothered to write, leaving one final draft as a testament to the incomplete, to imperfection, to maybe.

It was the first case they solved that had John looking at Sherlock and wanting, desperately, to kiss him. It was the first case when he glanced down at Sherlock’s hands and wondered what they—scraped on harsh brick and bruised on a stranger’s ribs—would look like intertwined with his own. It was the first case that dealt with a love so undeniable that Sherlock hadn’t scorned it.

It was the broken pieces of himself laid out irrefutably, for no one but himself to read.

* * *

One year after Sherlock’s death, John finished the pair of socks he had planned to give him just because, just to say “I love you” once more without words, just to give the gift of warmth and home to a man who too often spurned his own comfort in favor of brutal practicality, and he set them on the shining surface of his headstone, weighing them down with grief and a glass paperweight that looked an awful lot like an ashtray.

* * *

The next time he saw those socks, another year had passed and they were wrapped around a living, breathing Sherlock Holmes, their garish color peeking out above his shoes as he shifted restlessly in his chair. John wanted to vomit, to cry, to stuff the socks down the garbage disposal and never look at them again, but instead all he could do was fall into the man he loved and cling to the belt loops of his coat as though it was the only thing anchoring him to earth.

He thought it might have been.

* * *

The bin beneath his bed emptied again, slowly. Hats and socks and a blanket and endless heartfelt expressions of love-laced-with-grief emptied out across the flat, until he started to remember what it felt like to knit for the living, to knit towards a brighter future, to knit with a love that beat like a drum inside someone else’s chest, and he gained the courage to speak the words he'd only ever cast in yarn.

He tucked a pair of gloves in the pocket of Sherlock’s coat on a brisk morning in early March, and asked him to dinner.

A pair of socks matching John’s favorite jumper made their way into Sherlock’s meticulous sock index the following May (he'd asked for them).

And, for their second anniversary, John places a knitted, anatomically correct heart on the mantel beside Sherlock’s skull. There's a ring looped around the aorta.

**Author's Note:**

> Every pattern mentioned, neatly gathered in one place for your convenience:
> 
> [John's terrible attempt at a scarf](https://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/beginners-stitch-sampler-scarf) / [The (blue) scarf John gives Sherlock](https://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/henry) / [The Shakespeare soliloquy scarf](https://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/henry-v) / [The blanket John gives Sherlock after he's shot](https://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/chunky-cable-wrap) / [Plush socks](https://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/petty-harbour) / [Mrs. Hudson's vintage slippers](https://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/snabba-tofflor) / [A mitered square blanket](https://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/the-coziest-memory) / [The socks John leaves at Sherlock's grave](https://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/hattu) (I’m picturing these in an eye-burningly brilliant purple) / [The gloves](https://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/brooklyn-gloves) / [THE SWEATER THAT STARTED IT ALL](https://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/dr-watsons-cabled-crew-neck) / [The sock version of said sweater](https://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/elementary-watson-socks) / [The anatomically correct heart](https://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/heart-7)


End file.
